Kurt Weill and His American Identity

by Kim H. Kowalke

When Life Magazine ran a feature story in 1947 about the
Broadway-opera Street Scene and its "German composer," Kurt
Weill fired off a Letter to the Editor: "I have a gentle beef
about one of your phrases. Although I was born in Germany, I do not
consider myself a `German composer.' The Nazis obviously did not
consider me as such either, and I left their country (an arrangement
which suited both me and my rulers admirably) in 1933. I am an
American citizen, and during my dozen years in this country I have
composed exclusively for the American stage and written the music for
Johnny Johnson, Knickerbocker Holiday, Lady in the Dark, One Touch of
Venus, The Firebrand of Florence (ouch!) and Street Scene."
Later that year, Weill returned to Europe (for the first--and
last--time), but he avoided Germany. When he got back to his home in
Rockland County, he confided to his neighbor and collaborator,
Maxwell Anderson: "Coming home to this country had some of the
same emotion as arriving here 12 years ago. With all its faults (and
partly because of them), this is still the most decent place to live
in, and strangely enough, wherever I found decency and humanity in
the world, it reminded me of America."

America
was indeed "home" for Weill -- and had been for a long
time. A passionate commitment to the ideals of democracy, justice,
and freedom shaped his career in the United States, as he
wholeheartedly embraced American audiences, idioms, institutions, and
issues. "In a deeply democratic country like ours," he
wrote in 1946, "art should belong to the people. It should be
`popular' in the highest sense of the word. Only by making this our
aim can we create an American art, as opposed to the art of the old
countries." Preferring to work in the commercial theater where
he could reach out to a broad audience, Weill focused almost
exclusively on American themes, and after Britain and France declared
war on Germany in September 1939, he tried to rally the nation
against his former homeland.

"Everybody tries to help the enormous war effort in his own
way," Weill wrote to his parents in Palestine. He composed for
films, broadcasts, and recordings made by the Office of War
Information and the War Department. He served as a Civil Defense
plane-spotter and as production chairman of the "Lunchtime
Follies," which presented shows intended to boost morale and
productivity in military-related industries. He composed the United
Nations anthem "Song of the Free" and four songs on texts
by Walt Whitman, Ameica's poet. He wrote the music for Ben Hecht's
pageant We Will Never Die, performed at Madison Square Garden and
"dedicated to the Two Million Jewish Dead of Europe"). He
even registered for the draft, allowing him to conclude a nationwide
broadcast interview in 1941: "I have never felt as much at home
in my native land as I have from the first moment in the United
States....Those who come here seeking the freedom, justice,
opportunity and human dignity they miss in their own countries are
already Americans before they come. I know for myself that I would be
ready to fight if ever this American freedom would be threatened. And
since I have never felt this way before in my life, I think I may
have the right to say, `I'm an American.'"

But
as we celebrate the centenary of his birth and the semicentennial of
his death, most people still tend to think of Weill as a
"Brecht-composer," whereas he would probably have preferred
to be remembered as a "Whitman-composer." However, America
figured almost as prominently in Weill's works with Bertolt Brecht.
"How this Germany bores me!" the playwright groaned in
1920. "It's a good, medium-sized country, its pale colors and
plains are beautiful, but what inhabitants!... There remains:
America!" Indeed, America appears as the setting of Brecht's
plays more often than any other -- six of his collaborations with
Weill take place in that brave new world. &#9;"For every age
and part of the world, there is a place about which fantasies are
written," Weill explained. "In Mozart's time, it was
Turkey. For Shakespeare, it was Italy. For us in Germany, it was
always America." And a fantasy it was, for neither Weill nor
Brecht had yet set foot in America. Their invented promised land of
geographical impossibility was therefore pieced together from
snippets of newspaper headlines, popular song lyrics, Chaplin films,
and cheap novels. Brecht and Weill's mythological city of Mahagonny,
for example, is built in a desolate desert far from the cares of the
world, but within hailing distance of the harbor; down the coast from
the gold fields of Alaska, but too far north for the big hurricanes;
in miraculous proximity to both Pensacola and California -- not to
mention Mandalay and Benares. And in this pseudo-America, there are
no inhabitants, only immigrants.

As images from abroad bombarded the post-war rubble of Europe in the
20s and US capital flowed into Germany under the Dawes Plan, America
was perceived as a potent political and economic force, a potential
agent for change in Weimar culture, and a paradigm of a
technologically advanced civilization. This American "Other"
was a looking glass reflecting mirages of an Amerika that Germany
created in an attempt to bring into focus the future of its own
shattered cultural identity. Profoundly ambivalent, this metaphorical
Doppelgänger was at once a rallying point for cultural change
within a decaying society and a nightmare populated by machine-men
threatening to subvert the European sense of self. Seemingly
irreconcilable notions of things American comprised a constellation
of contradictions: a vast unspoiled wilderness vs. squalid
urbanization; the romanticism of the legendary Wild West vs. the cold
modernity of an urban jungle; cowboys and outlaws vs. engineers and
gangsters; rugged individualism vs. mass dehumanization;
technological progress vs. certain self-destruction. Fascination
alternated with attack.

The resulting image was almost always double-sided, alternately
titillating and terrifying. On the one hand, the final frontier for
freedom and opportunity, a sunkissed polar-bear paradise populated by
lumberjacks living with nature in the close harmony of a barbershop
quartet. On the other, a capitalist prize fight of unimaginable
corruption and technological cruelty, where ruthless gangsters run
slaughterhouses and sweatshops in league with the Salvation Army --
"hell on an unprecedented scale," as Hans Eisler described
Chicago, Berlin's metaphorical double. Brecht was especially
fascinated by this "Porkopolis," with its stockyards,
slaughterhouses, and commodity exchange, because it offered more
symbols of brutal capitalism than did New York or Los Angeles.

Nothing, however, was more exotic, more thrilling, or deliciously
threatening, than the figure of the jazz musician and his female
counterpart, the shimmy shaker. Weill's wife, Lotte Lenya, remembered
that "one or two Negro jazzbands played in Berlin and exerted a
strong influence on composers and the instrumentalists of dance
orchestras. Josephine Baker came to Berlin and Kurt and I went to see
her. I remember that we had one Sophie Tucker record, another by a
vocal group called the Revelers." The jazzband became a
hyperbolic representation of American otherness, collapsing not only
music and dance, but "primitive" and "modern,"
"African" and "American," into a single metaphor.
The jazz musician was a ready-made composite: a stereotype of a
transplanted African primitive who produced a new form of music which
could, in turn, absorb and transform the hectic rhythms of modern
life. For many Germans, African and American thereby became virtually
interchangeable and elicited extreme responses. Some heard in jazz
the apocolyptic accompaniment to the end of European civilization,
just as Ernst Krenek's jazz-violinist Jonny proclaimed, "the New
World comes across the ocean and inherits the old Europe through dance."

Weill embraced jazz as "the rhythm of our time" and "an
international folk music of the broadest consequence." The
foxtrots, Bostons, Charlestons, and tangos that crept into his
modernist musical language provided the perfect counterpoint to the
brash colloquialisms of Brecht's new language. And when the
"Alabama Song" (written in a pidgin English where Alabama
rhymes with mamma) was first heard at the stuffy Baden-Baden Music
Festival in 1927, Jessie and Bessie followed close on the heels of a
quartet of lumberjacks, who echo the refrain of the "Bridesmaids'
Chorus" from Der Freischütz to the raucous rhythm of a
foxtrot. If that year can now be identified as a turning point in
modern civilization, when national radio networks, underwater
tunnels, and international radio-telephone services were established
and Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic, affirming the wonder and
power of progress and technology, there could be no more potent
musical representation than Weill and Brecht's songplay Mahagonny.
Challenging the icons of German high culture in the year of the
centenary of Beethoven's death, its Americanisms reverberated
throughout Weimar culture.

But such brash hijinks and high hopes were shortlived. Soon a
different sort of New Germany would drive Brecht and Weill out. By
1941 both were living in the unbridled America they had loved and
dreaded so much in their imaginations. Their responses to the reality
of America were antithetical. Brecht chafed in exile, returning to
Germany one step ahead of McCarthy and deportation. Weill embraced
American culture wholeheartedly; if his works in Germany had used
America strategically to attack an unjust society, his works in
America were cautionary tales for a country he considered just.
Consequently critics have long talked about "the two
Weills," as if Weill's European and American careers could not
be contained within a single artistic persona. If today we are
finally beginning to comprehend Weill as a unitary figure, there will
always remain within his legacy "the two Americas" he
experienced -- the one he imagined from afar and the one he embraced
from within.

Performance of Kurt Weill's music is funded in part by the Kurt
Weill Foundation for Music, a not-for-profit, private foundation
chartered to preserve and perpetuate the legacies of Kurt Weill
(1900-1950) and Lotte Lenya (1898-1981). In pursuit of these goals,
the Foundation maintains the Weill-Lenya Research Center to serve
scholars and performers, awards grants to support excellence in
research and performance, administers Weill's copyrights, and
information on the worldwide centenary celebration of the birth of
Kurt Weill (2000).